Too many plants

When we moved to our house last year, we had 12 flower beds filled with over 100 types of plants. Last summer, I was so overwhelmed with trying to care for of it – weeding, watering, debugging, fertilizing, mulching, dead-heading, etc. – that this year I was determined to find a way to ease the gardening load by cutting down on the number of plants. So in May we removed an entire flower bed in the back of the house. Almost all the plants got transplanted, including a six foot pine tree, because I didn’t want to give anything up.

 

Then last weekend we hired two teenage boys to help remove a second bed in the front yard. Because I knew we were getting rid of this bed, I didn’t give it very much attention all summer. No surprise, it was filled with dandelions as tall as me and various other weeds overtaking every inch of space. What a mess. The beautiful plants were fighting for water, nutrients, and sun and simply couldn’t thrive in that state. It’s not that I wanted to ignore those plants. Rather it’s because I had so many to look after, that I just couldn’t give the appropriate amount of time to everything that needed my attention. My yard was too full of plants – good, beautiful, and even exotic plants – but just too many of them. And so in the end we had to throw out many whose roots where intertwined with weeds and were no longer any good (or would have taken even more work to save.)

 

It’s not hard to look at my life and see the application. So often I fill up my time with activities and projects that are good. They aren’t weeds of sin or past hurts. They aren’t dead or dying programs that no longer serve their purpose. No. They may be plants that could produce righteousness and flowers of virtue. They may give off a pleasant fragrance and glorify God. Often the calendar is full of valuable, edifying, life giving things. The problem comes because there is only one me and only so many hours of the day to tend the garden of my soul.

 

When we have too many flower beds and too many plants to tend, we start to do a poor job with some or all of them.

·   We might start to miss the weeds that so easily take root because we are distracted by other tasks. And so sin starts to crowd out the virtues that were growing once before.

·   Or we might not take the time to water the entire garden, choosing instead to focus on the plants that look wilted and are obviously in need of attention. And so our prayer becomes focused just on the painful parts of life instead of also being a time where we commune with God.

·   Or we might ignore the parts of the garden that were doing well hoping they will be fine without any attention. And so we fail to love those that are close to us and stop attending to the things that are crucial for our health.

 

It takes courage to remove good flowering plants from the garden of our lives. People might think less of us for not doing as much as they think we should (we even might think less of ourselves!). And the bare, dirt spot is ugly for a while, which tempts us to fill it up again. But we need the space and we need the time to be able to give proper attention to those things that God does want to grow in us. So, I encourage you ask God what needs to go. What “good” things are causing you to do a poor job of tending to your garden and might ultimately damage your relationship with the master gardener.